As mentioned in other threads, I think BF1 has by far the best class balance out of BF3,4 and 1. However I still get a niggling feeling whenever playing scout or support on infantry only maps that I could be doing better as a medic. This is never due to medic's primary weapons, decent though they are. It is due to the heal/ revive combo which manages to nullify so much enemy damage. It also generally makes other medic gadget choices redundant, thus hurting the class as a whole. It also makes for unsatisfying gameplay. This has been the case for several entries now.

BF4 at least vaguely tried to weaken them by putting cooldowns on the paddles and making players charge it up to get a 100% revive

BF1 inexplicably ditched this in favor of continuous instant 100% revives and an almost endless "man-down" time.

It seems to me they could balance the medic out by implementeing one or more simple changes to the gadgets.

1. make healing and revives mutually exclusive. So now a player can't have the best of both worlds. This is rather extreme though.

2. Remove the ability to heal yourself. That way the medic is actually a class designed to support teammates instead of an anti-infantry powerhouse that can casually heal through mortar barrages and explosions without batting an eye.

3. Reduce "man-down" time significantly to prevent medics reviving entire squads after every engagment and make them act more urgently.

4. Make the 1-revive limit last your whole life, not just a short cooldown.

5. Tie ticket loss to player deaths, not respawns, so reviving allies in the middle of combat only for them to be insantly killed actually carries a downside. This would also mean that while teams that medic blob are still effective at rolling over flags, they are heavily penalized for doing so recklessly. This would also make other classes more attractive in modes like team deathmatch.

Now I'm not recommending all of these be added together, I'm more just looking for a solution to the same tired medic-centric meta that Battlefield keeps developing. Anyone else feel this way?

Reviving and healing are absolutely far too easy and too fast for the power they have. Charging the syringe should be mandatory, health pack (and all other items) should have to be equipped before use, and health packs should have a proper use animation, they should not be something you can throw at the ground/a wall to self-heal as an extention of your reload in the middle of a fight. Man down timers should not be longer than respawn time, thiough on the flip side you should not be allowed to skip early. On a note related to reviving, squad leader only spawn should return.

To me it seems the most pressing issue is revive being too powerful for its risks, and support being sort of lame still.

Related, Mercy's (Overwatch) resurrect ability as been heavily debated and saw some changes, which in short removed her ability to mass resurrect (from up to 5 people down to 1), gave her cast time, and made her slower when using the ability, in sum increasing the potential for countering her and limiting its impact. People and pros are way more satisfied with this state.

The problem was that the ability fundamentally cancelled potentially more skilful plays at too little risk. Same can be seen in Battlefield.

Battlefield however went the opposite direction from overwatch's update and removed charge time, and potential vulnerability of newly revived people, in all removing counterplay for Bf1.

DICE should definitely increase risk of usage and limit usage even more.

Furthermore, being revived in the line of fire is annoying. Perhaps teammates who are being heavily/actively suppressed shouldn't be reviveable. That would help getting fruitlessly revived. Which would add preemptive counterplay as well.

Perhaps a delay before able to get up too?
Crouch to use?
Have a charge up.
Also, delay (some) revive point? REVIVE 25 *3 seconds later*: SUCCESSFUL REVIVE 75

2. Remove the ability to heal yourself. That way the medic is actually a class designed to support teammates instead of an anti-infantry powerhouse that can casually heal through mortar barrages and explosions without batting an eye.

Hell no to no heal. That would make the medic kit significantly less fun to play (the kit is more anti-infantry (on its own and by proxy), and that is better than being an archaic healer). It's a well-designed kit, improve the otehrs instead of reworking it. As mentioned before scout/recon and "Assault" (engineer in my heart) is in an improving spot. Support, while better, could use some more tweaking

Wanna help your team by sneaking through enemy territory to provide spawns? THIS IS NOT TEAMWORK FGT I HOPE YOU RUN OUT OF MOTION BALLS TOO EARLY TO BE SUCCESSFUL
Wanna be Javelin squad but only have two guys? BETTER NOT GET YOUR SOFLAM KILLED FGT THIS IS NOT TEAMWORK WITHOUT A SUPPORT DUDE DROPPING AMMO ON YOU EVERY 2 MINUTES

The average kills versus deaths recorded statistically would suggest that you're either getting revived or kill assists about 20-30% of the time per life ( would wager the minority of this is assists-as-kills). Whether or not you find that OP is really just a matter of opinion, I don't think its a terribly dominant mechanic. Self-healing is likely bigger in overall impact if you're concerned about what it does for the "good players".

I think the issue is more that with the exception of the AT weapons and planted explosives, the other class gadgets are just weak. The flares are amazing, but with only two you need to do a lot of resupply micromanagement. The support gadgets in BF have traditionally just been pretty weak overall, etc.

One thing I do know for sure is that the revive mechanic is very, very sensitive to nerfs. The changes in BF4 made reviving a really rather rare thing. On all but metro/lockers seeing no more than 5 revives per round was basically the norm. That's not good either, it means the mechanic is basically not being used. I think this explains why the BF1 syringe is the way it is; they actually wanted to see it used more than 5 times successfully per round.

Furthermore, being revived in the line of fire is annoying. Perhaps teammates who are being heavily/actively suppressed shouldn't be reviveable. That would help getting fruitlessly revived. Which would add preemptive counterplay as well.

Oooo I especially like this. Suppression on dead bodies would make them unrevivable.

And on that tangent, shifting Suppression to having more of an effect on abilities rather than gunplay would not only make it more interesting and arguably more useful and powerful, but would also end the debate about the merits of said mechanic's relationship to gunplay. As a basic example, being Suppressed would make your various actions take longer, from tossing a health pack, to throwing a grenade, to reloading, to equipping a gas mask, to getting into or out of a Mortar, etc.

The suppression idea is great. I just think it would need to be clearly signposted, like maybe put a cross through the revive symbol on the medic's screen, otherwise people might just get confused and think the gadget is broken, making for unsatisfying gameplay.

I also agree that it may just be that many other gadgets are too weak to compete. I think scout really got it the worst in this entry. I still find it bizarre that trip mines aren't guaranteed kills. Considering in BF4 support could have 3 claymores and was able to endlessly resupply himself with more and they were 1hk almost 100% of the time, and even then they still couldn't really compete with heals/ paddles. Now scout has 2, they do bugger all to anyone who runs over them and he can't get more without a support around. They're also kinda wasted on a long range class. IMO they were always most useful when aggressively capping/ backcapping flags as they could e planted at obvious entrances to the flag to prevent defenders getting the drop on me. All scout can really use them for is securing his sniper position.

So maybe some gadgets just need buffing. I still think it would be easier to just tone down the healing and reviving gadgets rather than trying to buff anything else. We all know how much BF players whine when things like mines and mortars become "OP".

I also liked the way Warface implemented the medic's heal and revive mechanics years ago when I tried it (no idea how it is now).
You had an energy pool from which both reviving and healing drew, and I think reviving cost 100% of your energy and healing cost 1% energy per 1% life. Energy recovery was reasonable, like 10 per second so you could either completely heal or revive one player every 10 seconds. Choose whether you want to heal and keep your allies in the fight or heal yourself and maybe revive your mate a few seconds later. Reviving takes a second or two to charge up, healing takes a few seconds of "press and hold this button" as well during which you cannot shoot.

Memorable quotes not taken yet:

Of course, this ignores the non-constant cross-sectional first moment of area across the chest as well as non-constant material properties of the boob; it would be difficult to perform a more detailed analysis (as in, I'd have to have a shape function AND I'd need to derive a function for elastic modulus as a function of lateral breast coordinate) but whatever. It's 2am and I'm lazy.

You should also answer this question I had posed in that thread: Would you be willing to pay your surgeon more if he was going to use a chainsaw for the opening incision of surgery? Clearly using a chainsaw isn't truly suited for surgery but that doesn't really matter. If he's "skilled" enough to be able to use the wrong tools of the trade, he should be rewarded for that skill right?

Something like 10s cooldown for medic and 1-3 minute cooldown for "patient" seems okay to me.

Sorry for my bad english - it's not my native language and I have difficulties with acquiring speaking/writing practice in my country. If I accidently insult you or say something wrong - I'm sorry, you can feel free to correct me.